My friend D. Michael Martindale posted a photo saying that if we don't like gay marriage, abortion, alcohol, marijuana, or various other vices or crimes, we are free to abstain, followed with the line, "Don't want your rights taken away? Don't take away someone else's."

I do believe in individual inalienable rights, and among those are rights spelled out very clearly and specifically in the Bill of Rights. Beyond that, there are lots of ideas about what constitute rights, but they are not spelled out in the Constitution.

I believe in your right to be free of unlawful search and seizure; to protect your life by your own efforts and means; to be secure in your property; to worship as you see fit; to share or advocate any idea; to the equal protection of the law. And maybe a couple I missed.

But when we start identifying access to specific substances as rights, that's not anything spelled out in, or even upheld by, the Constitution. When we identify specific activities that are not covered by those spelled-out rights, and which do affect others and even ourselves, and even in non-physical ways, and which are not part of the above-mentioned rights, then those things are not spelled out in or upheld by the Constitution.

It is a modern, and incorrect, notion that everything we hold dear is protected by the Constitution. Certain very fundamental things that we SHOULD hold dear, and upon which liberty and representative government depend, ARE protected by the Constitution.

There are many things we may hold dear, such as porn and pretty whores and the right to have the public applaud and pay us for pairing off with our gay lovers, but those are not requirements for being a free or Constitution-based society. There is incredible leeway under the Constitution to restrict things that are not actual rights, but individual preferences which are not central to our equal status as citizens.

Liberals invented the idea of making long lists of very specific rights. Libertarians usually reject such claimed rights that are really demands to transfer stuff and opportunity from others, though in Michael's case he says they have the right to demand approval for their perversity, not just to be left alone. But since both libertarians and liberals find themselves reeling out these massive lists of detailed rights, they both find themselves forced into opposing the right for everyone to vote their conscience.

Michael keeps saying, "No, I let you vote it, you just have to understand that your vote won't count if it reflects your religious belief in contradiction to my beliefs, because your vote is considered illegitimate until an enlightened court gives its secular stamp of permission." It's not enough to demonstrate that a law was passed through the Constitutional process, or that it doesn't violate any of the rights spelled out in the Constitution. Unless justices who embrace militant secularism are convinced that the law is also secular in its purpose, it must be annulled--not because it violates a specific Constitutional right, but on grounds that it is not secular, and that it will therefore tread on some right invented by a libertarian or a liberal.

This is the quick road to tyranny. We're already there in many places around the country, the most egregious example being the recent California law banning psychotherapists from helping a person overcome homosexuality.

If that's not a state-imposed ideology, and a criminalization of the exercise of belief, I don't know what is.

A reverse witch-trial: Jailed for NOT having supernatural powers

"Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila ... sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead."

The quoted article's take on the fiasco is to compare it to the Dark Ages.

"Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun, has an Italian court been so wrong about science."

That is completely backward.

Even a friend of mine who commented on this article in Facebook scoffed, "We know the world is flat because of the 2-D maps."

Again, the exact wrong reaction.

Though the court that tried these scientists was obviously hostile to the scientists themselves, there is not a hint of hostility to SCIENCE. In fact, the case would not have been tried without a judiciary and jury that was idiotically besotted with science, to the point of worshiping it and ascribing to it supernatural powers.

Since since the early 1990s, scientists started claiming that, out of a world filled with countless variables and massive influences, they had isolated a single class of molecule measured in parts per million as the single cause of a worldwide temperature upcycle (which turned out to last only 16 years). They were not only capable of  explaining all history with the phrase "survival of the fittest," they now had powers to gaze into the earth and all its elements and discern its deepest workings.

And not only were these scientists unanimously certain that they'd found the culprit, but they were equally certain they had the key of seership to tell us what would happen in the next decade and century, with predictions so dire--and so inarguable--that conscience and duty compelled them to demand the sacrifice of any wealth and liberty by commoners, in faith to the oracle's doom.

And they've been getting that faith and those sacrifices. The western world has bowed to the heirs of priests and prophets who, in the late 19th century, banished God from history by proclaiming the completely non-predictive "science" of organic evolution. Not until Global Warming, though, had they claimed to do more than give us gadgets and free us from superstition; now they demanded faith and penance and fealty like hadn't been seen since the Dark Ages.

So, should we really be so surprised when a bunch of ignorant European acolytes and laymen break out the torches and pitchforks, after the self-proclaimed prophets and miracle-workers fail to predict even one day into the future of a planet they claim to know so perfectly?

Looks like some folks are falling into a pit they digged themselves. 

The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilleyby Randy Attwoodreviewed by Preston McConkie

As “Four Boys of Broomhall” author Hamish McGlasson recently told me, “The best H.P. Lovecraft stories are usually written by someone other than Lovecraft.”
This eternal truth is demonstrated not just by McGlasson’s own work, but by a plucky novelette, The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley, by eFiction Magazine contributor Randy Attwood.
Being myself a non-fan of Lovecraft, I was still pleased to discern in Pilley many parallels to Lovecraft’s last written story, “The Haunter of the Dark” (though that’s probably like being reminded of that one “Star Trek” episode where Scotty saved the ship with a last-moment breakthrough in physics). A student of Lovecraft’s work I am not, but there has been so much said about the man, and his stock images and phrases are so familiar, that I recognized a skillful Lovecraft tribute.
The essentials are all there: a narrator speaking directly to the reader and warning of horror and calamity, with an opening sentence announcing the main character’s probable doom: “Edward Hawthorne had no premonition of the first disturbing and later horrifying consequences that would result from his joining the Friends of Pilley Park Garden Society.”

The other tropes abound: a building or grounds exuding spiritual darkness and foul odors; denizens driven to madness and murder; a discovered document holding an awful secret; demonic forces that crush men’s faith in visible reality; a confrontation with underworldly power; a secret language; knowledge and power that would destroy humanity; and at last, the protagonist’s frantic attempt to destroy or bury the emergent evil.

Oh, and plenty of purple prose.

Attwood says he wrote Pilley after finishing a much longer project, and wanted to try writing in a different voice. He did not directly copy Lovecraft’s settings of the Atlantic North, but adapted the tropes to his own region. Instead of Puritan cities crowded with Italian immigrants, it is set among the defeated former Confederacy  Instead of a crystal talisman hidden in a Rhode Island church spire, evil lurks at the bottom of a pond in a public park near Attwood’s own Kansas City.

As the pond is drained to allow landscaping improvements, residents on its edge begin to go mad, with some killing themselves or each other. The protagonist, a city codes inspector, discovers the secret of the evil force in a document attached to an 1870s-era building permit, hidden “in the bowels” of the county courthouse, left as a warning to future generations that the pond, on the site of the former Kirk Pilley mansion, must never be drained.

The document’s ong-dead author tells that Pilley was a Confederate Civil War veteran and sole survivor of a forlorn hope known as Pinson’s Defense. With a fortune won by questionable means, Pilley had bought the land where he and 19 other Rebels had held off 200 Union soldiers. He grew wealthy as a canny land speculator and slumlord, and with his fortune built a great mansion over the gravesite of his dead comrades. But even decades later there are still truck loads of dirt being excavated from under the home’s foundations. Fifty years after the war, Pilley and his wife remain unnaturally young, along with their butler, an ex-slave voodoo priest.

The writer of this history, a newspaper reporter hired by Pilley’s estranged wife, enlists the aid of an elite exorcist priest, and together they creep into the mansion’s dungeons. There they discover the secret of Pilley’s longevity, along with ghastly partial cadavers and a legion of men, formerly corpses from Pilley’s slums, who labor like orcs to expand the dungeon. Confronting Pilley, the power of the priest’s knowledge and relics meet unexpected repulse, and in the struggle more than one man goes to his doom.

Attwood ties this tale into the present through the eyes of the codes inspector, who foresees his own impending madness as he confronts the re-emerging evil.

The story is not only an emulation of all things Lovecraft, it contains things more thoughtful than a typical Lovecraft tale. Attwood authentically captures the tone of a Wilson-era news writer, despite one or two trivial stumbles (such as using “normalcy” before President Warren Harding had coined the word, and in having Pilley marry his “high school sweetheart” in a place/time without high schools).

Altogether, Attwood is above probably five percent of writers who attempt the style of a bygone age. Having spent half of my own reading in the classics and the works of recent centuries, I enjoy most historical fiction as much as a crushed-glass enema. Attwood not only captured the cadence and lingo of the time, but skillfully uses epithets that most writers now pretend never existed.

Their use isn’t gratuitous, but shows how well Attwood groks the minds of people two generations before his birth. His character, the fearless progressive news writer, records,

[Pilley] was a shrewd bargainer with farmers who felt more comfortable selling to a fellow former confederate soldier than to damn Yankees, niggers, or catholic foreigners. Pilley, however, had no compunctions about turning that land into housing developments where he was happy to sell homes to damn Yankees and to rent niggers claptrap houses. It was from those shantytowns of former slaves that Pilley recruited the labor to build the house he would require.

This passage succinctly illustrates Pilley’s wicked character, long before reporter and priest confront him in unholy catacombs, but through the eyes of the 1910s, not the 2010s.

This is a major way in which Attwood manages to out-Lovecraft the original Lovecraft. He weaves in subtle social commentary, in the quoted example and elsewhere, such as gently lampooning the motives of civic organizations and the self-preserving instincts of bureaucrats. The story has a plot—something frequently absent from Lovecraft’s works—and draws attention to realities of both historical and contemporary culture.

Lovecraft, we might say, was so fascinated by the ineffable otherworld that he had little to say about this one.

At 23 pages, The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley is barely a novelette. But as a $.99 e-book from either Smashwords or Amazon, the readee is worth the spendee.

Dream Cred

By Preston McConkie

2153 words

           I used to think it was a big deal to wake up screaming or swinging. That’s what the Vietnam vets did. It was a new version of the red badge of courage. I certainly didn’t expect it to happen to me, and when it did start it was two years after those 38 days from the Jan. 14 outbreak to the Feb. 25 invasion, then the six days of combat and the other two days falling back out of Iraq through Kuwait and at last to King Fahd Air Base and Al-Khobar.

          Two years went by and then, one day, a roommate touched me when I was asleep and I came awake gasping and panicked and hit my head on the wall.

          It pleased me a little at the time because you can’t choose how to wake up, and this gave me street cred as a real combat vet, and not like what I thought of myself as: someone who’d been there but hadn’t really seen it, hadn’t really done it.

          I didn’t regret never having to use my rifle to kill someone I could see fall and bleed. And helping hand up an 8-inch projo while someone else rammed it and another guy pulled the lanyard and sent it 20 miles downrange -- well, that was just like practice.

          The disappointment was not seeing the bodies. I never saw a wounded guy, never saw a corpse. Never even saw a blood stain. At first that just frustrated me. Later I decided God must have shielded my eyes, because everydamnbody around me saw the guts and the gore as we drove past. We’d driven down a highway of death, trucks still on fire with fresh bullet holes, only minutes after the M-1s and Bradleys had swept through and machine gunned and cannoned everything to junk. We’d bivouacked in the middle of bunkers and foxholes and I’d fallen asleep in my ammo truck while three terrified Iraqis huddled in a foxhole just 20 feet away, but I didn’t see them cuz I wasn’t on guard duty and too tired and dumb to be afraid, so I slept while the guys on duty cleared the holes and took the prisoners.

          And then on our last position forward we were in a wasteland of overturned cargo trucks and abandoned earth movers and spent a couple of days burning stacks of Romanian AK-47s still in their oiled-paper wrappings and burying mortar shells and even burning a stack full of rifle ammo and RPG rockets that went off with great hisses and left arcing smoke trails but didn’t arm themselves and never exploded.

Only one night, the last night before we reached Kuwait, our convoy stopped in darkness while the officers plotted the route with those ancient, massive, $35,000-apiece GPS readers, and the light wind carried the smell of rotting flesh. Shapes in the dark, if I remember, looked like berms pushed up by bulldozers, and somewhere out there were earthworks full of dead men. But I never got closer than smelling them.

So all in all, that wasn’t much to get worked up about. I saw smoke, I heard explosions, I saw a few prisoners get taken and turned loose after we fed them and realized we couldn’t keep them. I saw bedouins come bobbing their heads up to the battery perimeter, empty water cans in hand, motioning at the water trailer behind the old Korean War-leftover deuce-and-a-half truck, and the first time I held my rifle at port arms because I was on guard duty and I shook my head, but the battery commander came over and said, “C’mon, McConkie, let ‘im in.” And I returned the bow with heel-of-hand-on-forehead and the benediction of “Salaam!” while the smiling Arab scuttled to the trailer and filled his can.

          I remember the engineers from the 82nd Airborne driving around in armored vehicles and setting charges in bunkers I didn’t know were there and setting off ground-shaking blasts that sent gray mushroom clouds swirling up, and not knowing til later they’d been blowing caches of cycloserin nerve agent while we stood or laid around breathing the air, our protective masks tucked in their hip pouches.

So in the years afterward I sometimes thought the mystery cocktail of C4 smoke and nerve agent might be responsible for the shakes and the muscle-grinding and the feeling of doom that squeezed me til I’d bite my knuckles or burn myself or cut myself for relief/ But that wouldn’t give me nightmares full of dying men.

Even so, two years later the nightmares started. And I started waking up gasping or shouting. On my wedding night ten years later, I kicked my wife when she snuggled against me.

          I felt like a fraud. I’d done nothing to earn this kind of dysfunction. I hadn’t seen anything. I hadn’t killed anyone. The only blood I’d spilt on a foreign shore was from a slip while illegally sharpening an M1 bayonet.

I’d stood in one artillery firefight when the Republican Guards’ 2nd Division tubes almost got our range, and for about a minute their South African 155s started raining shells nearby. But their observers were dead and our choppers were out and maybe our radar trackers got their range too, and the guys on the bitch boxes called new coordinates and our 8-inchers shifted tubes so many mils quadrant and deflection and our next rounds pounded them to silent junk that we went out the next day and gathered up as trophies, so that we came back to Saudi Arabia dragging two Gerald Bull 155mm’s and a Russian 122mm

But there was no glory because the only Purple Heart handed out in the 2nd Battalion 18th Field Artillery Regiment went to a cannoneer who fell off a howitzer and broke his collarbone, which made the award a fraud. And the bronze stars were handed out “for meritorious service” but not for valor, to every officer in a Humvee and above lieutenant and every first sergeant and the sergeant major and the battalion commander and the XO and each of their drivers. But there was never a single damned brave thing done except that the battalion blundered across the line of infantry and armor on Feb. 28, 1991, because we’d suddenly and unexpectedly come across an enemy that hadn’t run away yet.

And because we were there, we got the call of “Fire mission!” and the farthest right howitzer fired a blind shot and the flying forward observers saw where it landed and shot a laser range-finder at the impact and calculated an azimuth and called it back to the boys in the old M113 command track, and they ran their slide rulers because computers back then were too slow for combat.

And while every gunner lined his sites up against the gun on his right, the privates with the commo wire were running lines to the fire direction track and hooking them up to the bitch boxes, and FDC called over “Fire mission, shell HE, fuse quick,” then read off the six-number deflection and then the quadrant. And the ammo carrier had broke down a day or two earlier and been left behind with its crew still on it and my HEMMT truck was backed up to the gun and I stood on a 12-ton stack of projos and powders and hooked the spider cables to the nose plugs in the projos so the crane could lift them down six at a time. And Charlie Battery on our left got off the first shot and then we were just a few seconds behind, and then FDC called an adjustment and the next rounds went out and the bitch box called, “Fire for effect.”

And while the red-bag powders were shooting fire out the muzzles and making the dust jump off the ground, and the sun was dipping down and the dark falling fast, the Abrams tanks behind us started shooting at nobody-knew-what except that tanks only fired line of site, so it was it had to be close, or closer than us gun bunnies in the King of Battle were supposed to be. And while the glass was crazing in our windshields and the door windows were blowing clear out of their frames because we were shooting bigger powder than we’d ever fired in practice, BANG! … BANG! … BANG! … there came that sound we’d never heard except far away, but that sounds nothing like a round going out the tube. Incoming fire.

There was no scream of a shell rolling in, and maybe that’s only what you hear when it’s about to land on top of you. But CRUMP. CRUMP. CRUMPCRUMP. And louder than it sounds in a word like CRUMP, but that’s the sound it makes.

And then I knew I was in a real fight and, standing on top of the ammo, I was on top of the world too, certain I couldn’t be touched, and I wasn’t a bit afraid because it was impossible to die just then.

And when it was over I set up my cot and went to sleep, and when the howizter went off a few times in the night I woke up for a second or two and went back to sleep because it was my first time on a cot in four days.

But that’s not trauma. That’s adventure.

So when I gasped and shot up in bed that first time when a roommate nudged me, I felt like a fraud. Like I’d wanted to be a real veteran and I’d envied the real men who’d fought in a real war. And when I kicked backward at my wife when she snuggled up to spoon I was ashamed because I wasn’t only a fraud, I was a bad fraud, cuz who ever heard of a wussy move like that? And when I got on my knees out of her sight below the bed and prayed silently that I would never do it again oh pleaseplaseplease don’t let me ever do that again, I felt lower than a snail belly cuz as a fake veteran I hadn’t even done a good job of faking my terror cuz I hadn’t shouted properly or done anything to dignify a wussy move like jerking my ankle backward. And I was only glad that I’d botched the act and hadn’t really hurt her.

The ringing tinnitus and low fidelity in my ears were the only genuine, but invisible, marks I could confidently blame on battle. Big deal.

Later I read a book, “On Combat,” and learned that “selective exclusion” is common in deadly fights. People would block the sounds of gunshots but hear the sound of empty brass hitting the ground. They’d edit out images that other people saw. It was a natural defense, the author said.

And finally it made sense, because it just wasn’t possible I’d been the only guy in Alpha Battery not to see a corpse or a torn-off limb in the road.

Accepting that these were the images in my dreams didn’t bring back any memories. But tI felt better, because if this kind of thing happened to cops and soldiers, maybe it’d happened to me, and maybe I wasn’t a wannabe.

At the same time I was learning to meditate my way out of a lifetime load of depressions and compulsions and resentments. As I learned to feel an emotion and stay with it and let it have its way and pass on, the dreams got more frequent and vivid. Later as I took morphine for an injury, they grew more colorful and intense and lasted longer.

And I stopped minding.

I don’t know why, but even now, most nights I go to sleep and dream of being with my high school friends, and we’re in a cafeteria and we’re all in uniform. And then we’re gathering weapons and defending ourselves and gradually every weapon malfunctions, and while I reload and replace and shoot the enemy keeps coming and it’s clear there’s no way through. And sometimes I’m shot and I feel real pain.

But even while it’s all happening, nowadays I don’t get too worked up. I’ve gotten so used to the dreams that even when they’re playing out, some part of my awareness knows they aren’t real. And when I’m awake I know the dreams are hints of real things I may never remember.

My dreams are my eccentric, erratic tutors and reminders. They’re always there and they have their odd ways, but I don’t mind them. Because now I know they’re supposed to be there, somehow.

And these days I don’t shout or gasp or strike out when someone wakes me up.

Of course, that doesn’t matter so much as I wish it did. I sleep alone these days.  

Bottoms up in the garden


To rejuvenate my soul after screening 16 stories, I went to the garden for to plant summer squash. In order to reach the earth I did get down upon my hands and knees and, being fat, soon saw that, if seeds were to be thrust into the soil that new life might spring up therefrom, then the world must needs behold my ass crack. 
And children did behold, and they wept and ran to their mothers; cats screeched and fled high into the trees; little dogs in despair did leap across fences and hang from their leashes so that they strangled and died and their yappings forever silenced; but at last the sowing was accomplished, and the weeping did cease, and many hearts were made glad by the hope of abundant harvest.

My soul is starting to revive. I'm not only writing again, I've started editing Wikipedia again. Things that I stopped doing because I was too exhausted as a truck driver to continue doing, and had given up because I was diverting all my money to pay for a third marriage, and because I had grown weary with life and decided didn't matter, I am once again doing for sheer love. 

Mind you, I've decided that life is much too short for me to spend any more time trying to woo and please a woman. This is not a statement against women. I suspect that, in a different culture, I could have a successful marriage. But my personality, physiology and history, plus this culture and these times, all combine to make an aromatic poop sauce out of my intersex relationships.

I probably say this more than I need to. But it comes into my mind more than it probably will as the years pass and I grow more content with my life. I'm reminded of it now because I've only had this point of view -- that bachelorhood can be a good thing -- for a comparatively short time, and because I'm gradually discovering more benefits. At this time I'm still in the process of convincing myself that the course I've found to be necessary, is also good.

So maybe I should stop feeling embarrassed that I talk about bachelorhood frequently. I notice myself mentioning it and consider the line, "the dude doth protest too much, methinks." Is it evidence that I don't believe what I say, that I say it so often? That I'm trying to persuade myself?

Not necessarily, and as I now think, no. This whole lifestyle, and the possibilities that go with it, cut against the grain of my religion and a lifetime of expectations and hopes. So yeah, I am trying to convince myself, in the sense that the trained areas of my brain still react against what I'm doing and planning. It's how things work when you adopt a transcendent idea and have to put off old ways.

I have my own reasons for deciding to be a bachelor which are actually perfectly consistent with my religion and philosophy; not the stuff I'd talk to just anyone about (it has nothing to do with wanting to caress men's bums). This makes it easier; I'm not rebelling against former beliefs, so much as adjusting my expectations. It's a huge change, and as I get used to it, I start thinking of ways my life can change. For instance, I don't HAVE to be a trucker any more if I don't want to. At least, I'm under less pressure to barf up money to maintain child support plus a marriage.

With the incredible kindness and encouragement of my younger sister, who invited me to live with her family while I finish my recovery from brain surgery and revive my writing, I am beginning to do just that. It's been heavenly to spend frequent sessions discussing books and ideas with her. I didn't know until just a few years ago that we shared literary interests. Now she's encouraging me to consider professional and artistic goals that I'd discarded long ago because they didn't seem practical.

Preston McConkie

5 hours ago near Washington, UT

• ‎3,100 words last night. Kinda scares me; it was comforting, to a degree, to think I was forever done with fiction, because that made me feel like a hard-nosed, practical man. Argh, now I have to contend with that cherished old ghost of creative compulsion.

  
  KLC: 

  I'm glad that you are not forever done with fiction. I think being a "hard-nosed, practical man" is highly overrated. I have no talent for writing, so I am truly appreciative of those persons who do have that talent. I spend a lot of tim...

  • • Preston McConkie Wow, that's profound, "characters who won't suffer if I make a mistake." That was the rub about journalism. When I screwed up, people sometimes got hurt.

      
      BG: On the other hand, my wife and I were talking about how we as readers suffered as teenagers when we thought Gandalf died in the Fellowship of the Rings, and how gratified we were when Tolkien brought him back in The Two Towers. Don't underestimate the impact that a well written character can have upon a reader.
    • Preston McConkie I've struggled for 15 years with the question of whether fiction was a worthy pursuit for a man of faith. More than 20 years ago I began wrestling with the question of whether science fiction was worthy for a man of faith. I determined then, that I wouldn't write atheist future fiction; if I could write in a multiworld universe, God would be its author. Very slowly I began to build a theistic but fascinating multiverse; I just thank my creator that I was raised LDS and have a theology that embraces an infinite universe filled with peopled worlds.
      
      But in 1996 I had what I then considered a permanent transcendent experience that turned me away from fiction and very quickly set me on the road that within weeks had me hosting a radio show and, in a little over a year, writing columns and news. I assumed for a long time that fiction was forever behind me.
      
      But the urge never fully departed and I remembered the joy I used to feel at creating life of my own. And I especially wanted to be someone who helped people feel joy like I felt reading spectacular books. While nothing has surpassed the exalted expansion of the mind and soul from reading God's word, still othing has ever surpassed for giddy pleasure and exhilaration the time I spent hiding in the BYU library during Education Week and devouring "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
      
      But Douglas Adams was the most charming of atheists who ever lived, and I could not decide if my pleasure was lawful. Since then, though, I've read other works and examined the exaltation they light in me, and decided that fiction, in its place, can be more powerful than truth. Undoubtedly this is so, since God himself uses it in his allegories, and Christ taught in parables.
      
      At last, re-reading The Good Earth, for some reason it comes clear to me that fiction can be as noble as anything people create, and simultaneously as diverting, restful and joyful. And then I put my hand to the keyboard last night and felt words flowing.
      
      That doesn't mean my latest composition is worth reading by anyone. I hope it will be, but at least I know it is good for my own soul.
      
      I'm writing in stilted manner right now; I hope I don't sound as pompous to others as it seems that I am. I deliberately aim for a blend of Shakespearean/King James English and the manner of the 19th Century. It's my favorite form of expression, and emulated by my favorite writers, including the inimitable Joss Whedon.
      
      Anyway, here I am, starting over with some of the emotions and hopes of myself at 23, hammering out that last ambitious novel on the eve of my LDS mission to England. That was the last story I finished. Now I have experience and perspective and hopefully can write something more worthy than that 280 pages that, when I came back from my mission, shocked me with its awfulness and has daunted me ever since, knowing that I could deceive myself so utterly about the worth of my own work.
      
      Here's praying I'm at least marginally less sucky at fiction than I was then.

The Cold Turkey Chronicles

Friday, March 2, 12:20 a.m.
Cold turkey since 8 a.m. yesterday. Hour 16.

I know what this feels like. For months on end, this is what it felt like virtually all day, every day, in 1994-95. It had been creeping up on me, becoming a more frequent visitor, ever since Iraq.

Back then it was a feeling of certain doom, and an agitation that made me clench every muscle, sometimes thrash in helplessness, sometimes bite into the back of my fingers as hard as I could, just to distract from the physical feeling of tension like the feeling of onrushing destruction.

This is what's called "dysphoria." It's a major effect of opiate withdrawals. It's the monkey on the back of the addict. I've felt it before but I've always retreated from it because it's awful.

This isn't quite as bad as the last time, when I was coming off 60mg of morphine each eight hours and 40mg of percocet each four. That was nasty. That was unbearable.

Well, this isn't what I'd have called bearable. It's just that I know what it is. I'm so well acquainted with it now, it no longer frightens me. That feeling of doom doesn't mean anything. It's just a feeling.

It hurts. There's no difference between emotional and physical pain; that's been proven. They affect the same nerves, they manifest in the same way. It's just that certain pain is associated with emotions. That's a good thing; a properly functioning body is supposed to manifest neural perceptions that way. It warns us. It cautions us. It chastens us.

Then there are things that take the nervous system and turn it upside down, disconnecting it from reality, artificially punishing or artificially rewarding. It's not a good thing. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

The first thing that did that for me was the nerve agent "blocking" pills I took in Saudi Arabia and Iraq for a month and a half. I trusted the leaders who told me to take it. It was experimental poison and even in theory it was a crazy treatment. The pills were nerve agent. In an average healthy body they were supposed to block a third of the neural synapses. Supposedly this would block the "real" nerve agent from working its way between the synapses. The pill poison was supposed to cause less damage, to work its way out of the system faster.

Whatta buncha crap.

The second thing was the actual nerve agent, cycloserin. On March 2, 1991, we were sitting in the sun in Iraq, resting up after an exhausting four days of dash and smash. The Republican Guards had fled, bloodied, abandoning miles of bunkers filled with chemical weapons. The brass in Riyadh sent down orders for the engineers of the 18th Airborne Corps to blow it all up.

I lay on a cot next to my still mostly loaded ammunition truck and watched the small, gray mushroom clouds billow up as engineers set off demo charges all around us. The explosions were sharp and loud, smacking the ears and shaking the ground, but not with a rumble. With a single, hard wham. And unbeknownst to every fighting man watching, enjoying the show of Saddam's war machinery going up in smoke, that smoke was laced with nerve agent, and pretty soon we were all breathing it.

To be continued. I feel like crap, and I gotta pop some Ambien and ride this out for a while.